This brief from the Institute for Research on Poverty explores the crisis that poor families face in finding and maintaining affordable housing. It outlines trends that led to the current housing situation of rising costs, stagnant or falling incomes, and a shortfall of housing assistance from the Federal Government. Most poor renting families now devote over half of their income to housing costs. Additionally, eviction has become more common in low-income communities. The brief describes consequences of eviction for parents, children, and communities, as well as suggestions for policy changes.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Family Unification Program (FUP) provides low-income families in the child welfare system with housing vouchers. FUP is critical to understanding the overlap between the child welfare system and housing/homelessness, as well as how to provide housing to vulnerable families and facilitate partnerships between public housing agencies and child welfare agencies. This report highlights FUP implementation in eight sites and offers innovative practices and impacts.

The National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University published this “State of the Field Scan” that explores how a mixed-income housing approach has transformed deteriorating public housing complexes into safer and more attractive developments for residents from a range of income levels. The report describes how mixed-income developments provide services to improve well-being and self-sufficiency. The authors conducted an online survey with representatives from 60 mixed-income housing developments to gather information on the demographics of the community as well as data on the types of supportive services provided, how developments tracked service use, and the developments' perceived outcomes of services provided.

This Trauma-Informed Organizational Toolkit was created to provide homeless service providers a roadmap for becoming trauma-informed. The Toolkit provides concrete guidelines for modifying practices and policies and ensuring appropriate responses to the needs of families who have experienced traumatic stress.

In a post from Sylvia Burwell, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, she describes a woman who experienced homelessness and was cared for by a community health center. Secretary Burwell notes the interagency commitment to end veteran homelessness by 2015, chronic homelessness by 2017, and family, youth, and child homelessness by 2020.

In this paper, the authors characterize the effects of neighborhoods on children’s earnings and other outcomes in adulthood by studying more than five million families who move across counties in the United States. The analysis includes quasi-experimental evidence that neighborhoods affect intergenerational mobility through childhood exposure effects.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment provided housing vouchers to randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing projects. The vouchers allowed families to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. Using administrative data from tax returns, the authors of this report present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children’s long-term outcomes. They find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were younger than 13 years of age at the time of moving. Children also live in better neighborhoods as adults and are less likely to become single parents.

The report by Enterprise Community Partners, with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, highlights some of the existing programs and best practices in addressing the nutritional needs of low-income communities. It also provides a series of actionable recommendations that demonstrate how housing providers can serve as a crucial conduit for providing low-income families with access to healthy foods and fostering healthy eating. The goal of this paper is to link the efforts of community developers, affordable housing providers, and other stakeholders and to advance the conversation between the housing and health fields.

On Monday, March 2, 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced its second round of 811 Project Rental Assistance (PRA) awards of $150,369,989 in rental assistance to 25 state housing agencies. In turn, the state agencies will provide permanent affordable rental housing and needed supportive services to approximately 4,584 households who are extremely low-income persons with disabilities, many of whom are at high risk of homelessness or transitioning out of institutional settings. A list of the 25 state agencies that were awarded funding is included in HUD’s press release.